So this morning Microsoft shipped what looks like a pretty great email app for the iPhone and iPad.

It works with Exchange, Outlook.com, iCloud, Google, and Yahoo emails. And you can also connect to your Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and/or Box accounts for sending attachments, etc.

In classical Outlook fashion, email, calendars, and contacts are in the same app. Which I’m not sure about. But there are definitely some is cool things going on:

• A quick filter button that shows you only flagged emails, unread email, or only emails with attachments.

• A “Focused” inbox view that is supposed to be Microsoft’s way of auto-filtering your inbox to only show you the most important emails in your inbox.

• Scheduling of email messages. Which is the Mailbox-style of “remove this message from my inbox and hide it for the next hour/day/week/whatever”.

• A files tab that shows you a list of all the files that are buried in attachments within your emails, and that lets you browse your OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox folders.

Outlook is certainly taking a lot of cues from a other successful iOS email apps, but also is very Microsoft-y in that there is a lot going on here. But honestly, my first impressions are good. Over on The Sweet Setup we picked Dispatch as the best iPhone email app for power users, but Outlook may give Dispatch a run for its money.

Over on Tools & Toys, Erin Brooks wrote a review of the Tom Bihn Parental Unit. It’s a diaper bag that doesn’t suck:

The market for diaper bags is pretty flooded — there are trendy diaper bags, designer fashion diaper bags, tiny diaper bags, giant diaper bags, giant purses people try to make “work” for diaper bags, and totes. Some people don’t want a “diaper bag” and opt for a regular messenger bag or a good old backpack instead. After trying numerous bags, the Tom Bihn Parental Unit ($140) has become my family’s go-to bag.

Erin’s review of the Parental Unit is the latest in our series of reviews of awesome bags.

For much too long email has been the main medium for communication at work. While email isn’t going away, team communication platforms like HipChat are allowing for more collaborative and productive communication experiences between co-workers.

HipChat combines every communication method you’d ever need — IM, group chat, screen sharing, file sharing, link sharing, video and voice calling — into a single solution. Working remotely, working across time zones, and working with the person right next to you becomes infinitely simpler and more efficient.

Create a chat room for your team or project so you can brainstorm, discuss work, or share files all in one place. Everything in HipChat is archived and searchable by keyword so you go back to a conversation whenever you want. @mentions allow you to bring your co-workers instantly into a conversation so you can get all of the right people involved in the discussion.

Best of all, HipChat is completely free for unlimited users. The Basic plan offers everything you need to get your team started: group chat, IM, file sharing, unlimited users and integrations. And if you’re interested in video chat and screen sharing, HipChat Plus is just $2/user per month.

Get your team on HipChat, sign up for a free account.

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My thanks to HipChat for sponsoring the site feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Last week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly was about technology. And, more specifically, how technology helps us to do our best creative work.

This week’s show is about another aspect of doing our best creative work: our inner work life.

When we have a healthy inner work life then we are poised to be at are our best in terms productivity and creativity. And so, how do we stay happy and motivated so we can be productive and creative? That’s what today’s show is all about.

Sponsored by:

• Macminicolo: Celebrating ten years of Mac mini hosting with the Decades Promo. Just $10/mo for ten months.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Macminicolo has been hosting mac minis for ten years, and they’d love for you to join them. To celebrate the milestone, the Decades Promo is just $10/mo for ten months.

Low cost. High performance. The perfect Mac server.

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My thanks to Macminicolo for sponsoring the site this week. These guys are the industry leader in providing world-class hosting and data center services exclusively for your Mac mini server. They host a ton of Macs minis, they’re located at one of the most advanced data centers in the world, and their Decades Promo is one heck of a deal to help you get up and running.

Over on The Sweet Setup we just posted our latest app review, and it’s for shared lists.

We chose Wunderlist as our favorite because it has great apps for every major platform (so you can share your lists with folks who aren’t as Apple-nerdy as you are), it has great and reliable sync, and a lot of extra features to make collaborating with others very simple.

Or if you want something more basic (like just one, maybe two, lists that you and your spouse share), then Apple’s Reminders may be the way to go.

In response to yesterday’s article about The Core Curriculum, a few people asked me how I intend to put together my notebook. Well, I don’t know yet. But, I have a pretty good idea.

The first question is the most important: should your Core Curriculum be digital or physical? Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

What’s great about a digital notebook is that you can add to it at any time. You can edit it, rearrange it, and tweak it. What’s bad about digital is that, well, you can add to it at any time. I fear that a digital notebook could be the enemy of the necessary brevity that would make the Core Curriculum manageable.

What’s great about a physical notebook is that you’re removed from the distractions of a glowing screen. You can write in the margins, make notes and highlights, and add your own insights as you go. But the disadvantage is that if you lose your notebook or you’re in trouble. And if you want to add to it or rearrange it, it could be difficult.

All that to say, I’m leaning towards a physical notebook. I’m going to put together my core curriculum as a Pages document and then print it out like an old fart. And to solve the issue of being able to rearrange pages and add new pages if I need to, I’m going to use the Levenger Circa System.

And, speaking of Levenger Circa…

• They’re having their Semi-Annual Sale right now, so a lot of their cool circa stuff is at discount.

• Patrick Rhone wrote a pretty great review of the Levenger Circa system for T&T a little while back.

After having a nice camera for two and a half years, I finally settled on a camera bag: The Ona Bowery. And it is awesome. It’s one of the most usable, handsome, and well-made camera bags I’ve ever come across.

On this week’s episode (episode 50!) of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about how even though technology can be a cause of distraction for doing our best creative work, so too can it empower us — not to mention enabling us to build an audience, a business, and to make a living from our creative work.

Sponsored by:

• Dash: Realtime dashboards for your website, your business, and your life. Your first dashboard is free forever.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

There’s an excellent interview in the latest issue of objc.io with one of the coolest guys around, Loren Brichter.

Regarding software today and where it’s headed:

Personally, I’m tired of the trivial app stuff, and the App Store isn’t conducive to anything more interesting. I think the next big thing in software will happen outside of it.

And regarding raising a kid:

I’m going to be crazy strict in terms of limiting screen time, which maybe is ironic given what I’ve done for a living. I’m not sure when it happened, but my perspective on the mobile revolution shifted. It used to be really exciting just to see someone pull out an iPhone. Now it’s like, “Hey kid, stop staring at your phone!” And apps, apps everywhere! Apps for wiping your butt. I’ve become an old fogey. Get your apps off my lawn!

(Via Viticci.)

Seth Godin:

The argument goes that making software powerful rarely pays off, because most users refuse to take the time to learn how to use it well. The violin and the piano, though, seem to permit us to create amazing music, if we care enough. The trick is to be both powerful and simple, which takes effort.

This trick of being both powerful and simple is where many of the best iOS apps shine brightest. Take for example apps such as OmniFocus, Drafts, Fantastical, VSCO Cam, Diet Coda, or Unread. These are world-class, desktop-quality apps. They are extremely powerful, yet because they’re built for the iPad and iPhone, they are also quite simple to use and navigate. Now, combine that with the one-window-at-a-time workflow of iOS and you’ve got an even more “simplified” user experience.

Lukas Mathis:

I’ve been playing around with a Firefox OS phone for a few weeks now, and I really like it. I think the most interesting thing about it is how simple everything feels. It feels like the first iPhone, with some additional modern amenities.

Today we published a fantastically written and photographed review of the GORUCK GR2 by Álvaro Serrano. When we were working on the redesign of Tools & Toys last fall, articles like this were exactly what we had in mind: equal parts helpful, informative, entertaining, and visually rich.

Dash is a web app for building and sharing realtime dashboards. They look great in a browser tab, on your phone, or on a wall-mounted TV through Chromecast.

To help you get started quickly, Dash has pre-built dashboard widgets for all kinds of services like Google Analytics, appFigures, GitHub, Google News, and Twitter. There’s also an API to display data from Dropbox or the web with custom widgets like speedometers, charts, tables, and leaderboards.

In a couple minutes you can set up a Dashboard to monitor your web servers with widgets for Pingdom, Chartbeat, and realtime Google Analytics. Or, you can track your fitness New Year’s resolution with pre-built widgets for Fitbit, Strava, and Withings Scale. You can even keep an eye on your online mentions with Twitter and Google News widgets showing the search results of several different phrases.

Dash’s pricing model was designed to encourage data sharing within the community. It’s a lot like GitHub. If you make your data public, Dash is completely free. If you want to keep your dashboard private, you’ll need a pro account for $10 per month.

Dash is currently running a limited time promotion. If you sign up for a free account now, you’ll also get one private dashboard free forever. No credit card required.

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My thanks to Dash for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I spent some time this morning setting up my own custom Dashboard for Tools & Toys and it’s awesome. There are a lot of drag-and-drop widgets, and you can write your own data to power any custom widgets (like charts, lists, etc.) The Dashboard I set up acts as a one-stop-page for me to see incoming tweets, current traffic numbers, and more. Dash is giving folks one private dashboard for free forever — definitely worth checking out.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.